Newsweek has an interview with Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty, a prospective candidate for the Republican nomination for president in 2012. He had lots of dumb things to say:

Let me ask you about social issues your party has been dealing with. In her book, Palin claims that McCain’s handlers wanted her to be silent about her belief in creationism. How would you describe your view?

I can tell you how we handle it in Minnesota. We leave it to the local school districts. We don’t mandate a curriculum or an approach. We allow for something called “intelligent design” to be discussed as a comparative theory. It doesn’t have to be in science class.

No, you don’t do it that way in Minnesota, it just isn’t discussed in the state standards at all. You may not do anything to prevent local school districts from teaching ID, but local school districts are constrained by court precedent that forbids the teaching of ID. And of course, ID is not a “comparative theory” because it isn’t a theory at all.

Where are you personally?

Well, you know I’m an evangelical Christian. I believe that God created everything and that he is who he says he was. The Bible says that he created man and woman; it doesn’t say that he created an amoeba and then they evolved into man and woman.

What the Bible says about the natural history of life on earth is no more relevant to what should be taught in schools than what the Bhagavad Gita has to say about it. Or the Quran. Or the Book of Mormon. We do not determine curriculum based on what the Bible says.